The case of Laura Spence - turned down for a place at Oxford in 1999 despite stellar qualifications on paper - rocketed higher education to the top of the political agenda, as politicians (notably Gordon Brown) queued up to rail against the elitism that her treatment seemed to represent. But universities have always been a major political issue, with expansion in the 1960s and then the upgrading of the polytechnics in the 1990s posing the big questions: what are universities for, how should they and their students be funded, how should they be controlled, and how should the universities as seats of learning relate to central government? In Uni Robert Stevens - himself a highly distinguished academic at such flagship universities as Oxford and Yale - provides the first history of the politics of higher education in the second half of the twentieth century.